Sports betting is a huge business. Illegal or legal, gamblers will always find the way to risk their money or look for someone who can make them rich in a very short time, if possible.

On one side, we have bettors, gamblers, sports investors, and all kinds of people, who try to win money in sports betting.

On the other side, we have bookmakers that take bets, and they are definitely the big winners at the end.

Somewhere in the middle, paid sports picks services were born. I am not talking about sports analysts, bloggers, or all kind of sports fans, or entrepreneurs, that work in betting industry, but I am talking about those who sell so-called betting picks.

The motivation for writing this article is Money Talks – Sports Handicapping Reality TV. How they sell this advice, and what they promise is a huge fraud, and they even made a show from this.

A guy comes to Las Vegas for three days with $50,000 and they promise him that he will win big. He is advised to bet from $10,000 to $12,000 on one game.
Smart sports investors do not bet more than 1-2% of their bankroll, and he was advised to bet more than 20% on a game.
Ladies and gentlemen, such an advice is not advice, but selling some unrealistic gambling dreams. If you decide to gamble, do it for yourself. If you gamble and you want to make a lot of money in three days, you don’t need an advisor. You just need a lot of luck. There is nobody in the world that can have such an edge over the bookmakers to make you huge money in just 3 days.
And the best part, if he wins, they split the profit. If he loses, it is like nothing happened. So, basically one guy comes to gamble and if he wins, he will just share his profit with some so-called advisor.

This is probably one of the biggest scams that I’ve seen.

So, what are paid sports betting sites, and how can they fool you?

They are sites or people that sell betting advice and usually they guarantee big wins, big money, and gamblers are willing to pay for their advice.

But are they really so good? Can they really make money for you? Do they really have the edge over the bookmakers or is it just good (or bad) marketing?

Do you think gamblers, who already struggle with some addiction, can think rationally after someone tells them that they can solve all the problems with good “winning” advice?

No.

Not only gamblers, but also all other people are easily fooled into spending money for such services. Here is how they do this:

Manipulating with results

Sports events are displayed with odds. So, what are the odds? Odds are probabilities that something will happen (example: Boston will win this game), turned into numbers. Odds are the prices that gamblers will pay, and if they want to win against the bookmakers, they will need to find the method that will give them the edge over the bookmakers. In other words, their probabilities must be better than bookmakers’ probabilities.

To understand this, we will take the coin flip experiment as an example. I hope you agree with me that we don’t have an edge, and if we repeat this experiment a lot of times, Heads and Tails will “happen” 50% and 50% times.

But does this mean, that if we flip a coin 30 times, that Heads and Tails will always be 15 – 15?

No. You can do experiment for yourself. I just did it and it was 17-13 for Heads.

So, we agree, that I don’t have any edge, right? But I can also manipulate with the “Heads” record. I can say that am on a 17-13 run for “Heads”. This is how sports betting services manipulate with results. “We are on a 9-1 run. We are on 43-32 run. We are making huge money three straight days….” They don’t have any edge and most of those results, that you see on the internet are by a luck, not by a skill. This is how they can easily manipulate the results.

They claim they are experts

Who is an expert? This is a person who is very knowledgeable in a particular area. Most of those betting services will claim that they are experts. But in reality, most of them are not experts, but just sports fans and they found the way how to sell betting advice. The world has changed. Sports betting is a serious business. And bookmakers are getting stronger and stronger every year. They use all kind of statistical methods to predict those games. They hire the smartest people to calculate the best lines. They hire people that are experienced and can adapt to new situations quickly.
Many betting services don’t use any statistical method, they don’t use analytics, and if you ask them basic things, like what is a yield, ROI, linear regression, or something like this, they don’t know the answer.
They will also claim that they have the right information, but with the internet you don’t need to pay for information anymore. Information is easy to find and unless they use advanced statistics to give you some value with in-depth analysis, you can do at least that good for sure.

Manipulating with the truth about bookmakers, their limits, and the odds

The ugly truth about sports betting is that around 97-98% of all people lose. That means that they will give more money to bookmakers than they take from them.
So, only around 2-3% of all bettors consistently beat bookmakers, but bookmakers do everything to limit their winnings with bet limitations, closing their accounts, and dropping the odds. So, even those successful bettors face all kinds of troubles with bookmakers.
An average bettor will not understand this and he can easily create an illusion that he will get the same odds as a betting service, which promised him huge money. Almost every bettor dreams about how he will live a dream and bet more and more money.
But in reality, most bookmakers will limit you or even close your account if you start winning.
The second thing are the odds. Bookmakers are fast and they will move the line quickly. Most bettors will never get the same lines as sports handicappers that send them picks. And the odds are the key. If you get -101 instead of +101 it can be the difference between winning and losing on a 50% hit rate.

Money back guarantees

They try to attract people with money back guarantee. But, if you pay $300 and lose $10,000, do you think that you will care about that $300? NO.
A money back guarantee is just marketing trick. It does not work in sports betting field; nothing is guaranteed. This is sports betting, it is a very risky business and anything can happen in every single game. Lock, Monster, Guaranteed, Lock of The Year and words like this, should not be used. Many people fall into this trap.

Marketing and reversal Pareto principle 20/80

There are smart gamblers who can make a profit and most of them bet for themselves without selling picks. If they want to beat bookmakers, they need to spend most of the time analysing the games.
With most betting services the story is totally different. They will spend 80% of time on marketing, spamming on social media, and how to sell their picks.

I am not saying that there are not smart investors and handicappers that can’t beat bookmakers. In fact, I think that there are people who are smart and disciplined enough to make a profit in sports betting. I am one of them and you can find my daily investment picks totally for free on my site. But to find them is very hard and even if you can find them it is almost not possible to follow their advice and get the same profit.

This is why a lot of paid picks services are bad. So, if you’re planning on using any, you’ll need to do as much research on them as you would if you were analysing your own bets.
Best Regards,
MB

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